Surprise! Companies eventually need to make some money.
But why do they need to choose the shittiest monetization model?
Perplexity got ads
21–30 of 369 posts
Re: Perplexity got ads
#22My wife and I both pay for Kagi Ultimate, which they've quietly developed as a Perplexity killer. Aggregates all the major LLMs and couples them with Kagi's clean search results with citations. All with no ads, no bullshit. It's the whole corporate mission. It's awesome. I hope enough people are willing to pay to make Kagi successful.
The Assistant product is incredible. It's been my daily driver (+Cursor), since September. I don't even bother with normal search results unless I really can't find something (like a specific GitHub issue that hasn't been cached yet)
Is the assistant similar to perplexity? Or something different?
Re: Perplexity got ads
#23No surprise here, but what a bummer that this is "The Way™" Just let me pay you $3-5/ month to never see an ad again. It's worth it to me since the service is actually decent.
Yeah but what if they took the 3-5 dollars and also showed you ads?
Re: Perplexity got ads
#24Makes me wonder if the lowering of prices in this industry is temporary. Currently, the API costs are at an all-time low, but how much of it is subsidized by investor money? Are we going to see increasing prices as the hype goes away and post-nut clarity kicks in the industry?
Re: Perplexity got ads
#25Surprise! Companies eventually need to make some money.
But why do they need to choose the shittiest monetization model?
If you have a better idea for making AI chatbots profitable then I'm sure all the AI chatbot companies which are losing staggering amounts of money would love to hear it. The first step is to find any business model that works, shittily or unshittily.
Re: Perplexity got ads
#26A large reason LLMs are useful for search and answering questions is because they omit the ads and (LLM-generated!) garbage listicles to give the searcher a straight answer. Ads are, by definition, worse for the searcher. If they were quality and strongly related to the query they would be organic results. IMO it was always inevitable that companies will put the ads back in, removing this benefit. Perhaps the paid AI…
> A large reason LLMs are useful ... is because they omit ... (LLM-generated!) garbage listicles What a sentence!
Right? It really is a racket that the same tool which generates massive amounts of noise can also filter down to some of the signal. Like if I sold tires and also threw fistfuls of nails in parking lots.
Re: Perplexity got ads
#27No surprise here, but what a bummer that this is "The Way™" Just let me pay you $3-5/ month to never see an ad again. It's worth it to me since the service is actually decent.
You mean Perplexity Pro? That thing they tried and found that no one was willing to pay for cuz users say they want paid options but then jump boat to the free things always?
Re: Perplexity got ads
#28AI products will be speed running the last few decades of tech - make a compelling product, then add ads based on the prompt, then store prompts from each user and build psychological profiles, and finally manipulate AI output to maximize user susceptibility to part with their hard earned money. Bonus points if they can get the user addicted to their product.
And then there will be an ai ad blocker
Re: Perplexity got ads
#29No surprise here, but what a bummer that this is "The Way™" Just let me pay you $3-5/ month to never see an ad again. It's worth it to me since the service is actually decent.
Yeah but what if they took the 3-5 dollars and also showed you ads?
That’ll never work.
Looks at cable TV
Looks at streaming services
Re: Perplexity got ads
#30Makes me wonder if the lowering of prices in this industry is temporary. Currently, the API costs are at an all-time low, but how much of it is subsidized by investor money? Are we going to see increasing prices as the hype goes away and post-nut clarity kicks in the industry?
Definitely, these companies are trying to buy market share, establish lock in, and then figure out the long term cash flows after competition folds.